Fewer photos to Facebook

Because of how they get their money, it seems to me that Facebook has a business model that is fundamentally opposed to the interests of its users. Since they don’t pay monthly fees, they aren’t Facebook’s customers. Instead, they are Facebook’s product, which is then sold to advertisers in the form of eyeballs and (more worrisomely) databases of personal information.

Because of that, Facebook is never going to be proactively involved in protecting privacy. Instead, it will always be pushing the boundary and doing as much as users are willing to accept. Bit by bit – visibly and invisibly – it seems that privacy protections will be eaten away and more and more data will be available to Facebook’s real clients, the advertisers.

In response to this, I have been gradually stripping down my profile. That’s not all that possible, however. For one thing, Facebook never forgets information you entered, even if you delete it. For another, it can guess all sorts of things about you based on your friends. It can guess what sort of products you are likely to buy, or even if you are gay.

Some people may not be bothered by this, but I am. As such, I am going to shift away from posting photography on Facebook. Instead, I will mostly rely on Flickr Pro, which is a paid and user-focused service.

[Update: 6:39pm] Fear not, photo appreciators! There will still be photos uploaded, and they are likely to be in smaller batches of higher quality work. These are from today: Rideau Canal Skating 2011.

Yes, I came to a similar conclusion a couple of months ago and have also stripped most info from my profile (though I know FB still have it in their systems) and all my photos apart from current profile picture. I now mainly use FB to contact some people who no longer use email (while occasionally trying to convince them to get off FB) and as another place for my blog feed to publish, since I know many of my readers access it that way.

Those are also the reasons why I am not abandoning Facebook. I want friends to be able to get my phone number and email address easily, even if they don’t keep a detailed address book personally. I also want to publicize blog content, climate change advocacy, and photography.

“How does a unknown dating site, with the absurd intention of destroying Facebook, launch with 250,000 member profiles on the first day? Simple. You scrape data from Facebook. At least, that’s the approach taken by two provocateurs who launched Lovely-Faces.com this week, with profiles — names, locations and photos — scraped from publicly accessible Facebook pages. The site categorizes these unwitting volunteers into personality types, using a facial recognition algorithm, so you can search for someone in your general area who is ‘easy going,’ ‘smug’ or ‘sly.’ … [The creators] say they will take down a user’s profile if a person asks, and the site doesn’t have any indication they are actually trying to make any money. Instead, it’s part of a series of prank sites, the first two of which aimed at Google and Amazon, intended to make people think more about data in the age of internet behemoths. Moreover, it’s a bit funny hearing Facebook complain about scraping of personal data that is quasi-public.”